Letterbox rant

Savvy_Sue

sjbrun wrote: »

Franked mail isnt supposed to be put in standard post boxes anyway. If you look at your license it tells you that you need to put it in the larger franking post boxes (which always have later times) in the bags royal mail provide or hand it in to a post office.

You can loose your franking license if you don't or get a letter from them.

Well, I can only tell you what we've been told we can do. We don't have large volumes, we haven't been given special bags. We've been doing this without issue for over a year now.

colino

You do have to chuckle how excuses are rehashed and reformed. Being in a semi-rural location, I have known for years, not since the privatisation, even the, "good old days" when you got a delivery before 8am and another before 1pm that the only way to have a hope of getting something delivered next day is to take it past two villages one town and place it yourself in the box at the sorting office in the biggest town nearby. RM needs a real shake up and with the infrastructure it has already got, should be performing much, much better.

martindow

My local box used to have a 4pm collection and a notice was put on saying it was 9am. I assumed that the delivery postmen coming in a van were to clear the box while doing their round. However despite the new notice a van still comes each afternoon at 4 even waiting a few minutes by the box if it is early.

custardy

martindow wrote: »

My local box used to have a 4pm collection and a notice was put on saying it was 9am. I assumed that the delivery postmen coming in a van were to clear the box while doing their round. However despite the new notice a van still comes each afternoon at 4 even waiting a few minutes by the box if it is early.

COLOD is a soft introduction. So in the beginning,the existing collection runs alongside to ensure no gaps in the USO coverage.

Savvy_Sue

custardy wrote: »

COLOD is a soft introduction. So in the beginning,the existing collection runs alongside to ensure to gaps in the USO coverage.

And in plain English COLOD and USO would be...?

custardy

Savvy_Sue wrote: »

And in plain English COLOD and USO would be...?

Sorry,thought I had already used the term on this thread.
Must have been another.
COLOD is collections on delivery. USO is the universal service obligation.

martindow

custardy wrote: »

Sorry,thought I had already used the term on this thread.
Must have been another.
COLOD is collections on delivery. USO is the universal service obligation.

Do you think it is being cleared twice a day at the moment - once by the delivery men and again by the van?

custardy

martindow wrote: »

Do you think it is being cleared twice a day at the moment - once by the delivery men and again by the van?

Thats right.
Keep in mind this has no extra costs involved.
The delivery staff are clearing the box within their deliveries.
The collection is as it was before.
Once the set up is finalised and stabilised,the supplementary collection is removed.(in a small unit,usually 2 weeks of supplementary collections)

There is a double edged sword here. Yup you add the collection to the delivery staff and remove work for a seperate collection driver(s)
However you then need to see how you will utilise those hours.
Whether that's voluntary redundancy,creating a part time duty and moving a FT OPG onto an existing duty,absorbing new builds etc.
staff dont just disappear.
Its really a unit by unit case and this is just the thin end of the wedge. It wont be long until you have a late collection at POs/,main boxes as your 'late' collection and all others being COLOD.
Ideally RM would invest in their IT (not gonna happen!) and people could check in real time if a box had been cleared yet that day.
However the PDAs used now are ancient and unreliable. hopefully the new ones (coming soon) will give reliable collection scanning data.

kazzah

Actually you are VERY Lucky your sorting office hasn't sent you a letter pointing out that you are SUPPOSED to sort your franked mail and put it in franked mail pouches NOT LOOSE into post boxes- I believe this is so that it can be easily sorted quicker than stamped mail.
Also you are only supposed to put it into a post box if you are posting AFTER the last collection at your post office or franked mail box. I have been sending franked mail for 18 years now and have red and green franked mail pouches which are dropped off at our local post office within a "mini supermarket".......... occasionally I will pop them into a post box - but not often

Savvy_Sue

firefox1956 wrote: »

Franked mail !!!!
You are living in the expensive dark ages............
Try email..........
:D:D:D

We do as much as we can by email. However, it may surprise you to learn that a) not everyone has an email address and b) some people who have email addresses prefer to receive actual physical post for some purposes.

sjbrun wrote: »

Franked mail isnt supposed to be put in standard post boxes anyway. If you look at your license it tells you that you need to put it in the larger franking post boxes (which always have later times) in the bags royal mail provide or hand it in to a post office.

You can loose your franking license if you don't or get a letter from them.

custardy wrote: »

Collection are done at a cost.
Franking provides a cheaper postage method. It doesn't come with a free collection thrown in.

Some areas even have these

sjbrun wrote: »

Franked mail isnt supposed to be put in standard post boxes anyway. If you look at your license it tells you that you need to put it in the larger franking post boxes (which always have later times) in the bags royal mail provide or hand it in to a post office.

You can loose your franking license if you don't or get a letter from them.

Just to re-state: when we got the franking machine we checked this and were told that we did not have to take it to the local 'franked post only' letterbox, nor did we have to use special pouches.

We do bundle our post up with an elastic band.

AND I did get in touch with RM about this, you won't be a bit surprised by their response, but at no point did they say I shouldn't be putting the letters in a 'normal' letterbox in the first place.

My colleague is back now, so the problem has a very large SEP field around it once more.